Uprooted

Chapter 26

“He must have scraped together every soldier in the south of Polnya,” the Baron of the Yellow Marshes said, studying Marek’s army. He was a big, comfortably barrel-bellied man who wore his armor as easily as cloth. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in our village tavern.

He’d just gotten the summons to come to the capital for the king’s funeral when Marek’s magic-sped messenger had arrived, told him that the crown prince was dead, too, and gave him his orders: to go over the mountains, seize Sarkan as corrupted and a traitor, and lay a trap for me and the children. The baron nodded, gave orders for his soldiers to gather, and waited until the messenger had left. Then he’d brought his men over the pass and gone straight to Sarkan, to tell him there was some kind of corrupt deviltry going on in the capital.

They’d come back to the tower together, and those were his soldiers encamped below; they were hastily putting up fortifications for a defense. “But we can’t hold out for longer than a day, not against that,” the baron said, jerking his thumb out the window at the army pouring down the mountainside. “So you’d better have something up your sleeve. I told my wife to write to Marek that I’d lost my mind and gone corrupted, so I hope he won’t behead her and the children, but I’d as soon keep my own head on, too.”

“Can they break down the doors?” I asked.

“If they try long enough,” Sarkan said. “And the walls, for that matter.” He pointed to a pair of wooden carts trundling down the mountainside, carrying the long iron barrels of cannon. “Enchantment won’t hold against cannon-fire forever.”

He turned away from the window. “You know we’ve already lost,” he said to me bluntly. “Every man we kill, every spell and potion we waste, it all serves the Wood. We could take the children to their mother’s family and marshal a fresh defense in the north, around Gidna—”

He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know, hadn’t known even when I’d come flying home like a bird to its burning nest. “No,” I said.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I know your heart is in this valley. I know you can’t let it go—”

“Because I’m bound to it?” I said, sharply. “Me, and all the other girls you chose?” I’d tumbled into his library with an army at my heels and half a dozen people around us, and there hadn’t been time for conversation, but I still hadn’t forgiven him. I wanted to get him alone and shake him until answers came out, and shake him a little more for good measure. He fell silent, and I forced myself to push aside the hot anger. I knew this wasn’t the time.

“That’s not why,” I said, instead. “The Wood could reach into the king’s castle in Kralia, a week’s journey from here. Do you think there’s anywhere we can take the children that the Wood can’t reach? At least here we have a chance of victory. But if we run, if we let the Wood take back the whole valley, we’ll never raise an army anywhere that can fight all the way through to its heart.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, sharp, “the one we have now is pointing the wrong way.”

“Then we need to persuade Marek to turn it around,” I said.

—

Kasia and I took the children down to the cellars, the safest place, and we made up a pallet for them of straw and spare blankets from the shelves. The kitchen stores were untouched by time, and we were all hungry enough after our day of running that not even worry could stifle our appetite. I took a rabbit from the cold store in back and put it in a pot with some carrots and dried buckwheat and water and threw lirintalem at it, to make it into something edible. We all wolfed it down together without bothering with bowls, and almost at once the children collapsed into an exhausted sleep, curled together. “I’ll stay with them,” Kasia said, sitting down beside the pallet. She put her sword unsheathed next to her, and rested a hand on Marisha’s sleeping head. I mixed up a simple dough in a big bowl, just flour paste and salt, and I carried it upstairs to the library.

Outside, the soldiers had put up Marek’s tent, a white pavilion with two tall spell-lamps planted in the ground before it. Their blue light gave the white fabric an unearthly glow, as though the whole pavilion had descended straight from Heaven, which I imagine was the idea. The king’s banner was snapping in the wind atop the highest point, the red eagle with its mouth and its talons open, crowned. The sun was sinking. The long shadow of the western mountains was creeping slowly over the valley.

A herald came out and stood between the lamps, official and stark in a white uniform with a heavy golden chain of office around his neck. Another piece of Ragostok’s working: it threw his voice against the tower walls like a blast of righteous trumpets. He was recounting all our crimes: corruption, treason, murdering the king, murdering Princess Malgorzhata, murdering Father Ballo, conspiring with the traitor Alosha, the abduction of Prince Kasimir Stanislav Algirdon and Princess Regelinda Maria Algirdon — it took me a moment to realize they meant Stashek and Marisha — consorting with the enemies of Polnya, and going on from there. I was glad to hear them name Alosha a traitor: maybe that meant she was still alive.

The list finished with a demand for the return of the children and our immediate surrender. Afterwards, the herald paused for breath and to take a drink of water; then he began to recite the gruesome litany all over again. The baron’s men milled uneasily around the base of the tower where they were encamped, and looked up askance towards our windows.

“Yes, Marek seems eminently persuadable,” Sarkan said as he came into the room. Faint smears of oil glistened on his throat and the back of his hand and across his forehead: he had been brewing up potions of sleep and forgetfulness in his laboratory. “What do you mean to do with that? I doubt Marek is going to eat a poisoned loaf of bread, if that was your notion.”

I turned my dough out onto the smooth marble top of the long table. I had the vague thought of the oxen in my head, the way I’d cobbled them together; they’d crumbled, but they’d only been made of mud. “Do you have any sand?” I asked. “And maybe some small pieces of iron?”

I kneaded iron shavings and sand into my dough while the herald chanted on outside. Sarkan sat across from me, his pen scratching out a long incantation of illusion and dismay put together from his books. An hourglass streamed sand between us, marking time while his potions brewed. A few unhappy soldiers from the baron were waiting for him while he worked, shifting from foot to foot uneasily in the corner of the room. He put down his pen just as the last few grains of sand spilled, precisely timed. “All right, come with me,” he told them, and took them along to the laboratory, to give them the flasks to carry downstairs.

But I hummed my mother’s baking songs while I worked, folding and folding in a steady rhythm. I thought of Alosha, forging her blade again and again, working a little more magic in each time. When my dough was pliable and smooth, I broke off a piece, rolled it into a tower in my hands, and planted it in the middle, folding up the dough on one side to make the wall of the mountains behind us.

Sarkan came back into the room and scowled down at my work. “A charming model,” he said. “I’m sure the children will be entertained.”

“Come and help me,” I said. I pinched up a wall around the tower out of the soft dough and started to murmur a chant of earth spells over it: fulmedesh, fulmishta, back and forth in a steady rhythm. I built a second wall farther out, then a third; I kept humming softly to them. A groaning sound, like trees in a high wind, came in from outside the window, and the floor trembled faintly beneath us: earth and stone, waking up.

Sarkan watched, frowning a while longer. I felt his eyes on the back of my neck. The memory curled in me of the last time we’d worked together in this room: roses and thorns sprawling furiously everywhere between us. I wanted and didn’t want his help. I wanted to stay angry at him a while longer, but I wanted the connection more; I wanted to touch him, wanted the brilliant crisp bite of his magic in my hands. I kept my head down and kept working.

He turned and went to one of his cabinets; he brought over a small drawer full of chips of stone that looked like the same grey granite as the tower, of varied sizes. He began to gather the chips up and with his long fingers pressed them into the walls I’d built. He recited a spell of repairing as he worked, a spell of mending cracks and patching stone. His magic came running through the clay, vivid and bright where it brushed against mine. He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.

I drew his magic into my working, running my hands back along the walls, my chant still marching away beneath the melody of his spell. I darted a quick glance at him. He was staring down at the dough trying to keep his scowl, and flushed at the same time with the high transcendent light that he brought to his elaborate workings: delighted and also annoyed, trying not to be.

Outside, the sun had gone down. A faint blue-violet glow flickered over the surface of the dough like strong liquor burning off in a pot. I could just barely make it out in the dim twilight of the room. Then the working went up like dry kindling. There was a jolt, a rush of magic, but this time Sarkan was ready for the dam-bursting. Even as the spell caught, he pulled abruptly back from me. Instinctively I reached after him at first, but then I pulled back, too. We fell away into our separate skins instead of spilling magic all over each other.

A cracking noise like winter ice breaking came in through the window, and shouts rose. I hurried past Sarkan, my face hot, to go and look. The spell-lamps outside Marek’s tent were rolling slowly up and down as if they were lanterns on boats climbing a wave. The ground was shuddering like water.

The baron’s men all backed hastily to the tower walls. Their thin fencework, little more than heaped bundles of sticks they’d gathered, was falling apart. In the spell-light, I saw Marek come ducking out of his tent, hair and armor shining brilliant and a gold chain — the gold chain the herald had been wearing — gripped in his fist. A scurrying crowd of men and servants poured out behind him, escaping: the whole great pavilion was collapsing. “Put out the torches and the fires!” Marek bellowed, his voice unnaturally loud. The earth groaned and rumbled all around with complaining voices.

Solya came out of the pavilion with the others. He seized one of the spell-lamps out of the ground and held it up with a sharp word that brightened it. The ground between the tower and the encampment was heaved and hunched up like some complaining lazy beast getting to its feet. Stone and earth began to rear themselves into three high walls around the tower, made of fresh-quarried stone laced full of white veins and jagged edges. Marek had to give orders for his men to pull the cannon back quickly, the rising walls pulling the ground out from under their feet.

The ground settled, sighing out. A few final tremors shuddered away from the tower, like ripples, and died away. Small showers of dirt and pebbles ran off the walls. Marek’s face in the light was baffled and furious. For one moment he looked up straight at me, glaring; I glared right back. Sarkan dragged me away from the window.

“You won’t persuade Marek to listen any sooner by provoking him into a high rage,” he said when I wheeled on him, forgetting to be embarrassed in my anger.

We were standing very close. He noticed the same moment that I did. He let go of me abruptly and stepped back. He looked aside and put up his hand to wipe a trickle of sweat from the side of his forehead. He said, “We’d better go down and tell Vladimir that he needn’t worry, we aren’t planning to drop him and all his soldiers into the center of the earth.”

—

“You might have warned us ahead of time,” the baron said dryly when we came outside, “but I won’t complain too much. We can make him pay for these walls, more than he can afford — as long as we can move between them ourselves. The stones are cutting up our ropes. We need a way through.”

He wanted us to make two tunnels at opposite ends of the walls from each other, so he could make Marek fight the whole length of the walls to get through each one. Sarkan and I went to the northern end to begin. The soldiers were already laying pikes along the wall by torch-light, with the points bristling upwards; they had draped cloaks over the poles to make small tents to sleep under. A few of them were sitting around small campfires, soaking dried meat in boiling water, stirring kasha into the broth to cook up. They cleared hastily out of our way without our even having to say a word, afraid. Sarkan seemed not to notice, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry and strange and wrong.

One of the soldiers was a boy my own age, industriously sharpening pike-heads one by one with a stone, skillfully: six strokes for each one and done as quick as the two men putting them along the wall could come back for them. He must have put himself to it, to learn how to do it so well. He didn’t look sullen or unhappy. He’d chosen to go for a soldier. Maybe he had a story that began that way: a poor widowed mother at home and three young sisters to feed, and a girl from down the lane who smiled at him over the fence as she drove her father’s herd out into the meadows every morning. So he’d given his mother his signing-money and gone to make his fortune. He worked hard; he meant to be a corporal soon, and after that a sergeant: he’d go home then in his fine uniform, and put silver in his mother’s hands, and ask the smiling girl to marry him.

Or maybe he’d lose a leg, and go home sorrowful and bitter to find her married to a man who could farm; or maybe he’d take to drink to forget that he’d killed men in trying to make himself rich. That was a story, too; they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren’t alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them — this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.

Sarkan snorted. “What good would it do them for you to roam around asking them questions, so you know that one’s from Debna, and this one’s father is a tailor, and the other one has three children at home? They’re better served by your building walls to keep Marek’s soldiers from killing them in the morning.”

“They’d be better served by Marek not trying in the first place,” I said, impatient with him for refusing to understand. The only way we could make Marek bargain was to make the walls too costly to breach, so he wouldn’t want to pay. But it still made me angry, at him, at the baron, at Sarkan, at myself. “Have you got any family left?” I asked him abruptly.

“I couldn’t say,” he said. “I was a three-year-old beggar child when I set fire to Varsha, trying to stay warm on the street one winter’s night. They didn’t bother to hunt up my family before they packed me off to the capital.” He spoke indifferently, as if he didn’t mind it, being unmoored from all the world. “Don’t make mournful faces at me,” he added. “That was a century and a half ago, and five kings have breathed their last since then — six kings,” he amended. “Come here and help me find a crack to open.”

It was full dark by then, and no way of finding any crack except by touch. I put my hand on the wall and almost jerked it back again. The stone murmured so strangely under my fingers, a chorus of deep voices. I looked closer. We had turned up more than bare rock and earth: there were broken pieces of carved blocks jutting from the dirt, the bones of the old lost tower. Ancient words were carved upon them in places, faint and nearly worn away, but still there to be felt even if not seen. I took my hands away and rubbed them against each other. My fingers felt dusty, dry.

“They’re long gone,” Sarkan said, but the echoes lingered. The Wood had thrown down that last tower; the Wood had devoured and scattered all those people. Maybe it had happened like this for them, too: maybe they’d been turned and twisted into weapons against one another, until all of them were dead and the roots of the Wood could quietly creep over their bodies.

I put my hands back on the stone. Sarkan had found a narrow crack in the wall, barely wide enough for fingertips. We took hold of it on opposite sides and pulled together. “Fulmedesh,” I said, as he made a spell of opening, and between us the crack widened with a sound like plates breaking on a stone floor. A crumbling waterfall of pebbles came pouring out.

The soldiers dug out the loose stones with their helmets and their gauntleted hands while we pulled the crack still wider. When we were done, the tunnel was just big enough for a man in armor to get through, if he stooped. Inside the faint gleams of silvery blue letters shone here and there out of the dark. I scurried through the mouse-hole of it as quickly as I could, trying not to look at them. The soldiers began working in the trench behind us while we walked all the long curve of the wall to the southern end, to make the second opening.

By the time we finished the second tunnel, Marek’s men had begun to try the outer wall, not very seriously yet: they were lobbing over burning rags soaked in lamp-oil, small thorny bits of iron with spikes pointing in every direction. But that almost made the baron’s soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well.

There wasn’t a place for us among them; we were only in their way. I didn’t try to speak to any of them, after all; I silently followed the Dragon back to the tower.

—

He shut the great doors behind us, the thump of the bar falling into the iron braces echoing against the marble. The entry and the great hall were unchanged, the unwelcoming narrow wooden benches standing against the walls, the hanging lamps above. Everything as stiff and formal as the first day I’d come wandering through here with my tray of food, so frightened and alone. Even the baron preferred to sleep outside with his men in the warm weather. I could hear their voices outside through the arrow-slit windows, but only faintly, as if they came from far away. Some of the soldiers were singing a song together, a bawdy song probably, but full of glad working rhythm. I couldn’t make out the words.

“We’ll have a little quiet, at least,” Sarkan said, turning from the doors, towards me. He wiped a hand across his forehead, streaking a clean line through the fine layer of grey stone dust clinging to his skin; his hands were stained with green powder and iridescent traces of oil that shone in the lamp-light. He looked down at them with a grimace of distaste, at the loose sleeves of his work-shirt coming unrolled.

For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.

“They’ll most likely attack at the first light of morning,” he said too quickly, cutting me off before I could say anything more. His face was as closed up as the doors. He stepped back from me and gestured at the stairs. “The best thing you can do at the moment is get some sleep.”